“Yes, this is a stupid UI decision made by people in Ubuntu who haven’t thought about accessibility. Luckily, getting the menu options back is simply a matter of finding the user switch applet, and removing it from the panel. Things are now set up so that if the user switch applet is not on any of the panels, the menu items will return.”

Oh my… I do use the fast user switch applet but not for shutting down. I like things to be on different places. This is because switching a user and shutting down the computer are totally unrelated things. Some UI designers may think its the same because you leave the current desktop. The fast user switch applet used to have only few entries with available users. Now they managed to have it overloaded. I do have welcomed in the past to not overload the panel – but of you start overloading the applets (mine has 12 options now) its the same thing. Overloading functionality is never good.

So fast user switch should be essentially what it is called. Right now it is also “user status”, “shutdown/reboot”, “lock screen”, “log out”. The thing is that you actually loose functionality every time you add some functionality because people have a harder time to find what they are looking for. And please dont force people to remove the fast user switch just because they want to shutdown via system menu.

system -> shutdown can be accessed via keyboard only. the user switch applet cannot. that’s why I wanted to have the entries back for a long time.
of course I didn’t think about deleting the user switch applet as I wanted to be able to shutdown at all.